Last night in London, Dr Ben Goldacre debated with Lord Drayson the state of science reporting in Britain.

Dr Ben Goldacre is author of the book (and column) Bad Science, and has become well-known for criticising science reporting in the UK.  His debating opponent, Lord Drayson, is the UK’s Science Minister, who contends that the standard is actually quite high, and has greatly improved over the years.

The debate, which promised to be lively, was streamed live on Thursday night – a taster of it can be listened to here. The video of the full debate is also available, and can be seen here.

Since the debate, Lord Drayson, who defended science reporting against Goldacre’s criticisms, has promised to investigate any cases brought to him by scientists who feel they have been mispresented in the press.  The full article about the debate, written by Zoe Corbyn of the Times Higher Education Supplement, can be found here.

If the editors and senior producers gathered at the World Congress of Science Journalists to debate whether science journalism is in crisis were generally unconvincing in their assertions that science journalism is actually in good shape, one presentation showed what can be achieved when a media organisation makes science coverage a priority.

Ian Katz (photo: Guardian)

The Guardian’s deputy editor, Ian Katz, said the paper’s early commitment to environmental reporting had won it not only praise but readers of the print edition and the website (which attracts 27 million readers each month).

Click on the player below to listen to Katz’s presentation at the WCSJ

One of the best things about mixing and mingling with the 900 or so science journalists and communications officers gathered at the World Conference of Science Journalists, is learning about how science communication is done in other parts of the world.

And today, science communicators from western countries were given a sobering insight into how science journalism works in parts of the developing world, where a huge amount of science is underway but is largely overlooked by local media.

Pseudo science from “experts” promising cures for AIDS and other diseases often grab headlines without the claims being properly verified.

“Those are the people that journalists will flock after,” said Diran Onifade, a journalist at Nigerian TV.

Onifade also outlined the corruption in the science system in many African nations that results in bribes being paid to buy prominent media exposure for scientific institutions.

As Onifade put it, an institution being visited by a wealthy philanthropist like Bill Gates can easily get a photo of the institute boss shaking hands with Gates on the front page of the national newspaper – as long as the price is right. The “off the books” transactions are a fact of life for scientific institutions public relations officers, said Onifade. The typical calculation is “X plus 1″ or “X plus 10″ – X being the amount a PR officer is willing to pay to have a story place, the figure following it being the additional amount the journalist or editor demands to publish the story.

With numerous clinical trials underway in African countries as drugs to treat everything from HIV to tuberculosis are tested, there’s a growing demand for skilled local journalists to accurately report the progress of such trials. But Onifade said such journalists were still thin on the ground.

“The people with the skills to pore through the facts and figures. They are not many.”

In the Middle East, science journalists have their own unique set of problems with language barriers and a lack of sophistication among science communication officers holding back science communication efforts.

“It’s always easier for me to know what’s happening in the US than it is to know what’s happening in the institution just across the street,” said Nadia El Awady, a Cairo-based science journalist.

This week the World Conference of Science Journalists gets underway in London.  Over 800 journalists and science communicators will gather to debate the crucial issues for their profession — how to survive, avoid pitfalls and even raise the standards of science journalism in a rapidly changing global media landscape.

The SMC’s Peter Griffin will be blogging and posting podcasts from the event all this week. Stay tuned to the Science Media Centre’s website for updates.

The conference has sparked a host of related coverage. The latest issue of Nature carries an extensive Science Journalism special feature to coincide, and other sites like the Knight Science Journalism Tracker have offered up some pithy commentary.

Among the many hot topics on the agenda, a session titled, “Is science journalism in crisis?” will delve into the implications of recent newsroom cutbacks and loss of specialist jobs.  Cristine Russell, President of the US Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, kicked off a recent preview of this session with the following, sobering figures on science journalism in the States:

Membership of the USA science journalism association, the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), stands at over 2000 but of these only 79 are now full time staff science writers for newspapers. The decreasing number of staff science writers is no doubt linked to cutbacks in the number of science sections in US papers, which have decreased by more than half from 95 in 1989 to 34 in 2005. The Boston Globe is an example of this process in action: First the health and science section moved inside the news section, then in January 2008 it went from 3 to 2 pages and by March it had been cut altogether. Health is now covered in the lifestyle section and science and technology in the business section with an emphasis on technology.

Despite the pressures, participants argue that there is a vital need for science journalists to carry on finding new outlets for their work. Another speaker, WFSJ President Pallab Ghosh, offers this analysis of science journalism’s changing role: “Once upon a time our job was to translate and enthuse about science. Now it’s to provide mature, independent analysis of scientific developments that will shape the future destiny of communities across the world.”